The railroad and telegraph system of the country are
public highways.... They have made it
possible for the large cities to absorb
the mechanic and laboring population of the nation. All except tillers
of the soil are being allured into the cities, and soon there will be
no middle ground. It is the tendency of the times to build up cities,
and I see no great harm to follow if the connection between city and
country, between farm and factory, is steady, strong, and satisfactory
to both. It is not
satisfactory to-day, and will not be until those for whom
the railroads were built control them.

Saving CommunitiesBringing
prosperity through freedom,equality, local
autonomyand respect for the commons.

Is there a Right to Public
Transit?

by Dan Sullivan

Chants at a transit rally

The Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network had been
invited to speak at a rally to prevent severe
transit cuts in Allegheny County, the county in which Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, is located. PIIN is a faith-based, left-leaning,
activist coalition of over 40 religious congregations and
religious organizations. Leaders of their Tranist Task Force had been
unable to
attend, so they
asked me to speak on their behalf. I had been working to help
their task force prevent drastic transit cuts . My
primary effort had been to provide economic analysis, but I
have also been helping them organize.

Various speakers made good points, some about
the hardships these transit cuts would place on the poor, and some
about how devastating the cuts would be to the local economy. I briefly
noted that transit increases land values by far more than the cost of
the transit, and then described the important work that PIIN is doing.

The protestors broke into chants before and after each
speaker's time to speak. The most frequently used chant was some
variety of "Public transit is our right" followed by a verse
with a few variants, each of which ended with the word,
"fight." And, indeed, some of them were in a fighting mood.

It was no time for me to ask just why
they thought
public transit was a right. I thought calling transit a right was a
losing tactic in the current political climate, and even my own first
thought was, "Of course it's not a right." Still, it got me thinking
a about the question from different philosophical
perspectives.

A Marxist View of Rights

The rally was organized by a young, self-described
Marxist, a student at
the University of Pittsburgh. His friend set up a card table
selling a few Marxist books and related materials. (Most of them had
either "Marx" or "Marxist"
in the title.)

Most opponents to Allegheny County's transit cuts are
certainly not Marxist or even socialist overall, as they include such
conservative, pro-business organizations as the Allegheny Conference on
Community Development. Indeed, PIIN itself is a coalition of
religious congregations, and one cannot expect them to represent an
ideology that is hostile to religion.

However, my many discussions with Marxists over the
years have taught me that they at least have a theory of rights that
they could apply to public transit, even if, in the United States at
least, that
theory is convincing mostly to fellow Marxists.

According to Marxist theory, "the people," (variously
interpreted to mean the masses, the majority, or the working class) are
the producers of all wealth, and have a right to whatever they can get
government to take from the exploiting class for the public benefit. It
is a more popular theory in continental Europe, which had made a
seamless
transition from degenerate feudalism to monopoly capitalism without the
intervening period of relative freedom that Americans had enjoyed.

A
Neolibertarian View of Rights

At the other
end of the political spectrum, modern
US libertarians (neolibertarians) espouse what they claim to be the
classical liberal
view of rights, generally the view of the country's founding
fathers, and particularly the views of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine,
whom they regard as the icons of American classical liberalism.

According to
classical liberals and to libertarians generally, all rights are
individual, natural
rights, deriving from the right of each person to his life and to the
fruits of his labor. Moreover, libertarians say that these are
"negative" rights, requiring only freedom from the violation of these
rights. That is, the right to one's life does not mean that government
must keep someone alive, but only that it may not take someone's life
away or allow others to take it away. Similarly, government needn't
guarantee the fruits of a person's labor to him, but must not take the
fruits of his labor away or allow others to do so.

From that foundation, most neolibertarians would argue
that there
can
be no such thing as a right to public transit. It certainly would not
be a natural right, as there is no such thing as public transit in
nature, and human beings existed without public transit for millions of
years. Were rights being violated for millenia by lack of access
to something
that did not exist? Moreover, neolibertarians believe that the right to
have transit (or health
care, or almost anything else) provided
to people means that others must be robbed of the fruits of their
labor. That is, they believe other people's labor must be taxed in
order
to pay for
the public transit that Marxists and some others claim as a "right."

Citing America's founders is certainly more appealing to
most Americans than citing Marx is, but most neolibertarians are more
anti-socialist than truly libertarian, and are as guilty
of "stewing in their own juices" as Marxists are. The implicit
neolibertarian conclusion, that poor people have no rights to anything
but
their earnings, is unsatisfactory to most people, and, in
fact, an
inaccurate interpretation of classical liberalism, of the founding
fathers, and particularly of Jefferson and Paine. Classical liberals
agreed with socialists that the poor were exploited, and only disagreed
as to how
they were exploited.

A Progressive View of Rights

The
good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the
antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which
reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism....

An intelligent
approach to the problems of poverty and racism will cause us to see
that the words of the Psalmist - "The earth is the Lord's and the
fullness thereof" - are still a judgment upon our use and abuse of the
wealth and resources with which we have been endowed.

- Martin Luther King

This is from one of King's last speeches, made in 1967,
the
year he died. It appears in his last book, Where do we go from here, Chaos
or Community?, which was published posthumously by
Corretta Scott King. Martin Luther King had recently been reading the
works of the classical progressives, and particularly of Henry George,
whom he paraphrased in several instances and cited in several others.
George had become famous for driving home a key point
that classical liberals had stressed and that most neolibertarians have
missed: that the earth is a commons, and that those
who hold title to the earth owe compensation to those who are denied
access as a result.

The true classical liberal position is that a right to
life
implies a right to space on the earth on which to live, and that a
right to the fruits of one's labor implies a right to to labor
somewhere,
without paying tribute to a private landlord.

The original progressive view, as well as the true
classical
liberal view, is that every person has an equal right to access land
and natural resources. Therefore, those who hold the very best land,
hold very
large parcels of land, or, worst of all, hold valuable land out of use
for speculative or monopolistic purposes, owe rent to the community as
a way of compensating the landless, or even owe rent to the landless
themselves.

The burden of paying this rent would do more than
provide services to the poor and producing classes and relieve
them of taxes. It would prevent land monopoly itself by making
it unprofitable to hold land out of use.

Compensatory Rights

According to many classical liberals, the right to
government services such as transit or health care would
not be fundamental rights, but compensatory rights - rights
given in compensation for the denial of the fundamental right to labor
the earth. Jefferson was quite explicit about this:

Another
means of silently lessening the inequality of [landed] property is to exempt all from
taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or
property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in
any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that
the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural
right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live
on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be
appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to
those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental
right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed.

Jefferson the philospher understood that people had a
fundamental right of access to the earth, but Jefferson the pragmatic
politician also understood that this right would likely be denied them
by powerful landed interests. The least landed interests could to
is pay all the taxes and provide adequate employment for the landless.

Jefferson also feared that the growth of land monopoly
would drive working people into cities, noting that, "When they get
piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become
corrupt as in Europe." Jefferson was exactly right, and the issue
before is that, without transit, people who are crowded into poor
neighborhoods in our cities are unable to get to jobs in other parts of
the cities.

By curtailing public transit and preventing these
"crowded" people from getting to where jobs are, we violate our
obligation to "take care that other employment be provided to those
excluded from the appropriation." This violates their compensatory
right and gives them the right to take up unoccupied land and use it.

Tom Paine was even clearer about compensatory payments
from the landed to the landless:

[I]t is
the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is
individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of
cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to
express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this
ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.

Paine proposed that each citizen get an endowment at age
21 to start off in business, plus a payment each year beginning at age
50 as a sort of social security dividend, all from rent charged to
those with land. It is similar to the dividends each
Alaskan gets from royalties on Alaskan oil and minerals. Of course,
this is not the
exactly a right to public transit or other services, but
anyone with a share of the nation's land rent would easily be
able to pay for private services.

The Common-Law
Right to Travel

Both classical
liberals and classical
progressives had profound respect for common law. Under common law, the
right to travel is a fundamental right. Indeed, denying someone the the
right to travel is essentially the same as declaring him to be under
arrest. Once a road or even a
footpath is in use, it is illegal to close it, or add tolls if
it is free, or spend tolls from an existing toll road for
any purpose other than paying off the expenses of the road itself. The
state also has an obligation to maintain roads that are already under
use.

The rationale
for this is that people locate
along a road with the reasonable expectation that they will continue to
enjoy access
to that road. They are robbed of the fruits of their labor if, for
example, they can no longer get those fruits to market. Similarly,
those who depend on roads or transit systems to travel to work have
arranged their lives with the expectation that the road or transit
system would continue to give them access to their jobs.

Under this
principle, the people who have a right to
transit are the ones who have enjoyed transit in the past, and whose
loss of transit forces them to move their homes or their businesses.
Tenants suffer a personal hardship and a financial cost for the
remainder of their leases, and landholders suffer a loss of
value.

In legal
parlance, this is a "taking." Under common-law principles, it would be
worthy of compensation. Indeed, it is
more of a taking than are zoning laws that lower land values by
prohibiting future uses. After all, those zoning laws only take away
speculative land values, which economists describe as "unearned
increments," while the loss of access through a closed road
or lost transit line devalues already-constructed buildings,
cost
businesses their profits and cost workers their wages. The fact that
our courts apply the takings principle to the taking
of speculative land values and not to the loss of wages or
profits of producers shows that our society, or at least our courts,
respects privilege more than it respects earnings.

Everybody's Right at Some Level

It turns out, then, that our Marxist protester friends
are
right, that there is
a right to transit, even if they blame wealth instead of privilege and
capital instead of land, and even if they assume that the political
power to implement something makes it a right. They none the less
recognize that there is a profound injustice in a system that crowds
people into colonies of poverty and denies them access, even
to the menial jobs that are left to the
landless.

Neolibertarians are right that there can be no such
thing as a fundamental
right to transit, even if anti-socialist blinders have made
most
of them
fail to see what their forebears saw, that fundamental rights include a
right of access to the earth, and that there are such things as
compenstory rights when fundamental rights have been
violated. They are also right
that poor people would not need subsidies of any kind if their
true fundamental rights had been respected, even if these
neolibertarians
have missed a few fundamental rights along the way. Finally, they are
right
that taxing other people's labor to fund transit is a denial of those
other people's rights, even if most of them fail to recognize that
there are taxes that can be levied against privilege without violating
people's rights to the fruits of their own labor.

Classical liberals are right that there can be
no such thing as a "free market" in a system riddled with privilege,
and that titles to
charge people for use of the earth are privileges.

But most of all, Martin Luther King was right, that the
real truth lies in reconciling the truths buried within socialism and
capitalism. King had rediscovered the classical progressives and
classical liberals who had zeroed in on privilege, unfettered by the
false struggle between monopoly capitalism and monopoly socialism.

So If Public Transit Is a Right, Why Can't We Afford It?

There are many reasons why we can't afford public
transit, and none of them are just. We can't afford transit for the
class that pays rent because we have spent hundreds of millions to
buy stadiums for the class that collects rent. We can't tax
small local businesses any harder because we have given hundreds of
millions in tax breaks to entice big corporations to locate here and
drive our local businesses out of business. And our elected leaders
won't
tax land values, even though transit increases land values by far more
than the cost of the transit, and even though land value tax costs home
owners less than any other broad-based
local tax.

Every one of these excuses violates principles
of justice, whether
one views justice from the perspective of a socialist, a classical
liberal, a neolibertarian, a progressive, or someone like Martin
Luther King, who was always digging deeper, seeking truth wherever it
may lie.

We can't afford transit because we have squandered our
wealth on privilege, and those with privilege have the power to prevent
proper transit funding and haven't the sense to allow it.